Every one of our Relicts had her private sitting-room attached to her bed-room, the house having been built expressly to suit the demands of _bourgeois_ widows with fortunes. Thus our _salon_ was of very little account until after dinner, when our widows, instead of returning to their own rooms, the garden, or the boulevard, where they spent the day, herded together around card-tables almost as closely as sheep in a pen. The _salon_ was not intended for daytime use; in the bitterest weather it had no fire until evening, and it had but a single window, which looked out upon the pavement of a well-like court arched over, three stories above, by a handkerchief bit of sky. Very little light or air ever entered the box-like place; during the day its atmosphere was stale and heavy, at night almost fetid. Whenever we ventured to pass an hour there our struggle was always against fate. Slyly we would leave the one door an inch ajar, or surreptitiously unclose the window a fraction as much. Scarcely, however, had we begun to congratulate ourselves upon success when half a score of antique roses flaunted and flared, and the death-knell of sly hopes sounded with echoed and re-echoed cry: "_Mon Dieu!_ I smell air!" "_Mon Dieu!_ Smell you not air?" "_Mon Dieu!_ Smell we not air?" "_Mon Dieu!_ Smells she not air?" "_Mon Dieu!_ Smell they not air?" Almost all our _veuves_ had children and grandchildren in Paris, and we were continually surprised to see the mundane elegance of these younger branches of our withered old trees. It showed the usual history, however, of _bourgeois_ parents who had worked steadily, lived humbly and economically, to gather _dots_ for their daughters and open careers for their sons, to see them thus rise to positions in life far above their parents. Every day some of these younger branches came to our house in handsome carriages and toilets; and indeed on some days the number of elegant visitors who rang at our door gave the impression of a gay reception _a la mode_ rather than of the ordinary visitors of a _pension bourgeoise_ at Saint-Maude.